Berat, Gjirokaster and Ali Pasha Tepelena

From being one of the least known corners of Europe, Albania has now started to become a tourist destination. Outside travellers had been here and written about the country and its people. Among British travellers, they included Byron early in the 19th Century and Edith Durham a century later. Now, two decades after the end of the isolationist communist regime, the numbers are growing, and the infrastructure is being built.

In the south, Berat and Gjirokaster are both UNESCO protected sites, their fine old cities displaying unique architectural styles. Berat is known as the city of a thousand windows. Looking up from the valley of the Osum River at the Mangalem district, rising up the hillside towards the citadel, it is clear why. Each white-washed building presents a façade of large windows that take up most of its area. Unlike the traditional defensive towers of northern Albania, with their tiny windows, closed against a hostile outside, the houses of Berat appear open to the world. It is a beautiful sight.

City of a thousand windows, Berat

The citadel, built along the crest of the hill above Mangalem, is an impressive size. Many outside powers saw the value of the site, which was at different times in the Middle Ages held by Byzantium, Bulgaria and, briefly, Serbia, before finally being taken by the Ottomans. Inside the walls are houses as well as numerous little churches, mostly closed for restoration, and a ruined mosque that once served the Ottoman garrison.

Inside the citadel, Berat

Early in the nineteenth century, Berat was briefly incorporated into the semi-autonomous dominion of Ali Pasha Tepelena, one of the most colourful Albanian rulers of the Ottoman period. Travelling south from Berat, in the town of Tepelana, the home region of Ali Pasha, is a statue of the old man, who died in his 80s, reclining in his oriental robes, his belt stuffed with weapons, white beard flowing across his chest. Born into a powerful family, Ali Pasha’s father was murdered by rivals when he was a teenager. Turning to brigandage, he gradually clawed his way back, in time finding favour with the Ottoman authorities. In 1788, he seized Ioannina, now in north-west Greece, from where he controlled large chunks of Albania and Greece. Finally, this over-mighty and independent ruler came into conflict with the Sultan, and was killed in 1822. Byron visited him at his court in 1809, writing with approval of the Greek cultural revival that he encouraged, and of his renowned bravery, but also of the tyranny and cruelty of his rule.

Ali Pasha’s life illustrates the complex, ambiguous pattern of national and religious affiliation which characterised the Balkans before the advent of modern nation states forced peoples into more homogeneous national territories. An Albanian from Tepelena, as a Muslim and an Ottoman potentate many would have considered him a Turk. Yet the language of his court in Ioannina was Greek.

On the coast, south of the largely Greek speaking town of Himara, is a castle named after Ali Pasha, at a little place called Porto Palermo. Guidebooks often state that the castle was built early in the 19th Century for Ali Pasha’s wife. Others assert that in fact it long pre-dated Ali Pasha, and was probably Venetian. But it was in his territory. Around the fortress are other, more modern fortifications, abandoned and ruined buildings of a communist era military base, and several of Enver Hoxha’s once ubiquitous bunkers squatting around the castle walls. Close by is a submarine base, tunnelled into the rock.

A bunker at Port Palermo

Ali Pasha also added Gjirokaster to his realm, and renovated and extended the fortress there. The fortress was used by both King Zog and Enver Hoxha as a prison for political prisoners. Gjirokaster produced two of the most notable Albanians of the 20th Century, Hoxha and the novelist Ismail Kadare. Gjirokaster too has a very particular architecture. Some of the big stone houses that were once home to extended wealthy families include shaded terraces in between wings on either side, where the families would have spent much of the time during summer. Hoxha’s house burned down in 1916, and on its site there is now a replica of a traditional Gjirokaster house, with its rooms for hospitality, separate rooms for men and women, and windows through which the women could look in on the men, but not vice versa. Here, the guide told me, a bride-to-be could spy on her future husband for the first time.

Gjirokaster

Gjirokaster contains an ethnic Greek minority, and is considered the centre of the Greek community in Albania. The city, as well as much of what is today southern Albania, was claimed by Greece and occupied by Greek forces during the Balkan Wars and again in the First World War. As the international powers favoured Albania, local Greeks in Gjirokaster proclaimed an Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus, which received international sanction, but did not last long. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference confirmed the region as part of Albania.

Like elsewhere in the Balkans, there was no clean boundary line, with one national group on one side and another on the other. Just as there were Greeks left on the Albanian side of the border, so Albanians, known as the Chams, were left in the northwest corner of Greece. As with other indigenous minorities in Greece, the Chams did not fare well. Having suffered discrimination in the inter-war years, and accused of collaboration with the German and Italian occupiers during the Second World War, the Muslim Chams were expelled from Greece, while the Orthodox Chams were subjected to the same kind of assimilationist pressures imposed on remaining Macedonian and Bulgarian Slavs in Greece.

These issues continue to affect Greek-Albanian relations. Albanians worry that Athens deliberately tries to inflate ethnic Greek numbers in Albania, encouraging Orthodox Albanians to declare themselves as Greeks. A plan to include a question about ethnic affiliation in the census this year for the first time, strongly supported by Greeks, raised fears among Albanians about Greece’s intentions.

And since the end of communist rule in Albania, the descendants of the expelled Chams in Albania have started to raise their voices, demanding the restoration of their lost property rights in Greece. In the past couple of years, the Chams have organised their own political party, the Party for Justice, Integration and Unity (PDIU), which has broadened its message from Cham rights to a wider pan-Albanian nationalism which, if its appeal continues to grow, would be bound to poison relations with neighbouring countries. It is as if the lessons of a decade of ethnic conflict in former Yugoslavia have not been learned.

Nevertheless, Greece’s systematic denial of the rights of minorities is a disgrace in an EU country. Athens’s hullabaloo about the rights of Greeks in Albania, a country that has Greek-language schools, dual-language road signs in Greek areas, and which, by comparison with Greece, is almost a model of a country that respects minority rights, cannot elicit much sympathy given Greece’s ill-treatment of the Chams, Macedonians and other minorities in Greece.

Sukhum and Abkhazia

Journeying to Sukhum, one could almost feel like being in a normal country. Soon after leaving Gali, the road becomes much better. In fact, the road north of Gali is in the process of being re-asphalted. Maybe it will soon extend through Gali to the boundary. But if that happens, I suspect it will be because the Russians, the source of the lion’s share of Abkhazia’s budget, want a proper road for their military base at the boundary, not out of any sense of responsibility towards the Georgian inhabitants of Gali. The police-manned barriers along the road to Sukhum (all up, with no stops during my journey) are a rather intimidating reminder that this is not a normal country.

The burned-out former government building, Sukhum

To an extent, life in Sukhum does seem rather routine. Visiting in July, the place is thronged with Russian tourists there for a seaside holiday. They perhaps give it a more bustling appearance than would be the case out of season. But since the expulsion of its Georgians, Sukhum is a much emptier place than it once was. Away from the seafront, the centre of tourist activity, and a few renovated streets in the town centre, there are lots of abandoned, derelict buildings, the still unhealed scars of the war. The government building, burned when the Abkhazian forces took Sukhum in September 1993, remains as it was, a burned out shell. Like many buildings, the railway station, a vast, typically Soviet structure, is gradually being taken over by greenery. Perhaps this has been the fate of sacked cities over millennia; a remaining, truncated population retreats to a few areas of the town, leaving the rest to collapse and return to nature.

Nature reclaims the ruins, Sukhum

Neal Ascherson described a visit to Abkhazia not long after the conflict in his brilliant book, Black Sea: The Birthplace of Civilisation and Barbarism. At that stage Sukhum was barely functioning, its officials working without pay, its ministers without proper doors to their offices. That is no longer the case. Government offices stand amid well-groomed parks; vehicles, complete with Abkhazian license plates (a crucial symbol for a new state), stop at traffic lights and are directed by traffic police; banks open and close. The place works.

It does better than just work. The seafront is really pleasant, a shady walk, flanked on one side by a mass of pink oleanders, eucalyptus, and palm trees. The lush green of Abkahzia’s sub-tropical climate is a great attraction. It is easy to see why so many Georgians speak wistfully of how much they miss Sukhumi. At one end of the promenade, near the president’s office, men sit in the shade of the oleanders, playing chess and other board games, drinking coffee. There is a special kind of coffee here, Turkish coffee with its own little quirk. The individual cezve coffee pots, filled with coffee and hot water, are pulled to and fro in a tray of burning hot sand until the mushy scum that forms on top just begins to rise and boil over. Once or twice a day I watch this ritual, before taking my little cup to sit under the oleanders, looking out at the sea.

Coffee under the oleanders, Sukhum

Seeing the hordes of Russian tourists on the beaches, in the restaurants and coffee shops, I cannot help wondering whether this might not be the basis of a viable economy. Its other asset, its climate, is suitable for growing citrus and tropical fruits for export. Mandarins are ubiquitous; I did not, however, find freshly squeezed mandarin juice to be a pleasing substitute for orange juice. But no. In reality, Abkhazia depends on the Russian subsidy, and it is the Russians who run the place.

A visit to the Abkhazian foreign ministry, to pick up my visa, was instructive. I had made a note of the address, and there, sure enough, was a large official looking building. The foreign ministry, I thought. But no. The foreign ministry was just one short corridor up the stairs on the first floor. The building housed other ministries and government agencies as well. The finance ministry was situated on a similarly short corridor opposite the foreign ministry. On the foreign ministry corridor, there was an office with a couple of desks for the consular section, another room for protocol, one for information and so on. And just one lavatory, a gents. I guessed that the ladies’ was across the way, in the finance ministry. It brought home what a toy-town place Abkhazia is, recognised as independent only by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Pacific island states of Nauru and Vanuatu (as well as South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria, themselves not widely recognised).

Following the brief renewal of conflict over South Ossetia and the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the Russian army took control of Abkhazia’s boundary. Many Abkhazians did not like it, and there was even some resistance. The degree of dependence on Russia is troubling to many Abkhaz. But they have no choice. This is not an independent country; its sovereignty is a sham. What the Russians intend in the longer term, whether the eventual goal might be the full incorporation in the Russian Federation, is hard to guess. Probably they are keeping their options open. Even before the 2008 conflict, a leading Georgian international affairs expert told me in Tbilisi that he did not believe Georgia would ever recover Abkhazia (South Ossetia, given its proximity to Tbilisi, was another matter). Yet most of the world continues to affirm its support for Georgia’s sovereignty in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. What must be especially unsettling for the Abkhaz is the thought that a future, post-Putin Russian government might one day change its policy, decide to improve its relations with the West and to normalise relations with Georgia.

For the time-being it is hard to see circumstances in which Abkhazia’s status vis-à-vis Georgia could be resolved. Despite Tbilisi’s attempts to sweeten the prospect of a return to the Georgian fold, including the offer extensive autonomy for Abkhazia, there is, for the present, no incentive for the Abkhazians to take up such offers as long as they enjoy Russian support. But their position is precarious, dependent on Moscow’s goodwill and its ongoing bad relations with Georgia.

It is easy to sympathise with the Abkhaz; subjected to ethnic cleansing by imperial Russia, to a colonial policy which saw their territory swamped by other nations, and to oppression and forced assimilation policies under the Georgians Stalin and Beria (Abkhazia’s longstanding Greek community was, like other Black Sea Greeks, transported into exile by Stalin, their place taken by inward Georgian migration). That Abkhaz were resentful is little wonder. Georgians have rarely shown much sensitivity to smaller peoples in territory they regard as their own. For many, Abkhazia is Georgian land, and that is all. In so far as they would be permitted to exist as a distinct people, Abkhaz feared they faced a future similar to that of the native Americans, living in villages in the hills, much like reservations, while most of Abkhazia was thoroughly Georgianised. Some Georgians do acknowledge the distress of the Abkhaz. One young woman in Tbilisi told me that, if she were an Abkhaz, she would not want to live in Georgia. Another Georgian admitted that the Abkhaz had been treated like second-class citizens during Soviet times.

As the Soviet Union broke up, the Abkhaz saw their opportunity, like other submerged nations, the Baltic peoples and the Georgians themselves, to escape such a fate. But the road they took meant the forcible expulsion of the Georgian population, another injustice that did not in any way erase the earlier injustices suffered by the Abkhaz, but rather compounded them. Of course, there are other examples of states founded upon the violent expulsion of people whose presence was undesirable. Israel springs to mind. But the Abkhazians are less likely to get away with it.

It need not have been so. Unfortunately at the time of the conflict, the government in Tbilisi was dominated by nationalists with no sense of any need to reassure the Abkhaz (or the South Ossetians) about their position in an independent Georgia, or to reach compromises with them. But what kind of future can there be for a state ruled by a people less than 100,000 strong, a minority in their own land, based on the expulsion of nearly half its population, and utterly dependent on a big neighbour whose future support cannot be relied upon? For now, the Abkhaz may see little reason to compromise. The Georgian government, powerless as it is at present to restore its rule in Abkhazia, is offering compromises. Abkhaz suspicions about its good faith are understandable, given the record, including the attempt to retake South Ossetia by force in 2008. The Georgians have a lot to prove. But a future as a fief of Putin’s Russia, based upon the denial of the fundamental rights of the Georgian expellees, cannot be a sound foundation for statehood.

A visit to Gali, Abkhazia

Walking across the Inguri bridge into Abkhazia, there is something of a Cold War feel, crossing on foot the line in a frozen conflict. I travelled by taxi from Zugdidi to the boundary line, and was dropped off just before a barrier closing the road to traffic. The taxi driver indicated that the way to Abkhazia was straight ahead. And so I walked, my backpack on my back, not really knowing what to expect. Behind me, a huge Georgian flag flew at the top of a massive flag pole. Ahead, the Georgian writ no longer ran.

The Inguri crossing, looking towards the Abkhazian side

The Georgian police sitting in a little cabin showed no interest in me, and so on I walked, past a couple of young Georgian soldiers and through a chicane of concrete blocks, and onwards to the bridge. The bridge is long, extending over an expanse of marshes and little streams, the main flow close to the Abkhazian side. I only saw a couple of vehicles crossing, both from international aid organisations. Others were crossing on foot, Georgians from Gali district, the first district on the Abkhazian side, who had been allowed by the Abkhazians to return to their homes, and to pass to and fro across the boundary. There were also a couple of covered wagons that ferried people backwards and forwards across the bridge at a horse trot.

Reaching the Abkhazian side, any apprehensions I had had of potential problems proved unfounded. While there was a large Russian base next to the crossing, no Russian soldiers were in sight. Just friendly Abkhazian border guards, who checked my passport and took the entry permit I had received from the Abkhazian foreign ministry by email attachment. Gaining entry to Abkhazia turned out to be straightforward for a foreign visitor. An application form sent by email to the foreign ministry, and the receipt of the permit a few days later. Then all I had to do was to go to the foreign ministry to receive a visa, at a cost of 20 dollars, once I reached the capital, Sukhum.

Arrived in Abkhazia, I took a taxi to the first town, Gali (in Georgian, Gal for the Abkhazians). Like all the taxis waiting at the boundary, it was a rickety, shaky old thing that clattered and rattled over the bumpy, pitted roads to Gali. It seemed there had been no maintenance of this road since the conflict of 1992-93.

In that war, with Russian support, the Abkhazians succeeded in breaking away from Georgia, of which Abkhazia was an autonomous republic (although it has not gained wide recognition). Abkhazia, or Apsny in the Abkhazian language, had been incorporated into imperial Russia in the 1860s. In what is remembered by Abkhaz as genocide, over the following years a large part of the Muslim Abkhaz, as well as the neighbouring Circassian, Ubykh and Abaza populations, were expelled to the Ottoman Empire, many of them dying when the ships carrying them sank, or from disease as they languished in the Ottoman ports of arrival. Abkhazia was already multi-ethnic, including, like much of the Black Sea coast, a Greek population. Georgians claim there had been Georgians there for thousands of years. What is certain is that following the depopulation caused by the Russian expulsion of much of the Abkhaz population, their place was taken by immigrants, especially Georgians (mainly Megrelians from western Georgia), as well as Armenians, Russians and north Caucasian peoples. The result was a dramatic shift in the ethnic balance, so that by the end of the 1980s Abkahz amounted to less than 20 per cent of the population of Abkhazia, and Georgians some 45 per cent.

Demographics were the key to the conflict, and remain central today. The numbers are disputed, but the wholesale expulsion of the Georgian population as the Abkhazian forces advanced in 1993 drastically reduced the population from over half a million to probably less than 200,000 now. But Abkhaz still constitute a minority, the other significant groups being Armenians and Georgians. Since the late-1990s, the Abkhazians allowed Georgians to return to Gali district. Perhaps as many as 60,000 have done so, although the number is fluid, as many keep a foot on both sides of the Inguri, crossing into Abkhazia to look after their homes and plots of land, and to tend family graves. Many avoid the Inguri crossing, and the bureaucracy and expense of being officially registered in Abkhazia. Instead, they cross by numerous unofficial paths, often by minivans, which can ford the river at some points, dodging the Russian soldiers who monitor the boundary. Sometimes they are caught, fines are imposed and minivans impounded.

A poster with the Abkhazian flag in Gali

As the poor state of the road to Gali and of the taxi that took me along it indicated, Gali is in a dreadful state. Many buildings are abandoned. In some derelict apartment blocks, their facades a series of gaping holes, there are occasional flats that are nevertheless occupied, laundry flapping on the balconies. The market area, with its squalid little shops with a mean little selection of goods on offer, is a depressing place. What kind of life do people have here? One answer to that question is possibly that they have a better life than the people still housed in collective centres for those displaced by the conflict, over the other side of the boundary. I saw some of these buildings in Zugdidi, decrepit and open to the elements, no doubt damp and freezing cold in winter. People have been in these places for nearly two decades. There has been international aid money to repair and improve the buildings, but the work has often been shoddily carried out. These victims of the conflict seem to be forgotten and unwanted, offered no hope or future. They are kept out of the way and left to rot on the pittance the Georgian government pays them.

Gali town centre

Most of the people in Gali are Georgian, speakers of the Megrelian language, part of the same Kartvelian language group as Georgian, as well as Svanetian and Lazuri. They are second-class citizens. Clearly the Abkhazian government in Sukhum and its Russian paymasters have invested almost nothing in this Georgian-inhabited district since 1993. The place is run by Abkhazians. The Abkhazian flag flies there, and a memorial honours the Abkhazians who died in the conflict with Georgia, not the Georgians who were massacred and were driven from their homes. In order to hang on in Gali, the Georgians have to accept many humiliations and compromises. A few thousand of them have even taken Abkhazian citizenship.

Although most of the people of Gali speak Megrelian, the lingua franca, the language of public communication, is Russian. I witnessed a neat illustration of this travelling back by minivan from Sukhum to Gali at the end of my visit to Abkhazia. Sitting in the van in Sukhum, waiting for it to depart, people were speaking to one another in Russian. Not long after leaving Sukhum, the van stopped to pick up a woman who was obviously well-known to many of the passengers, and to the driver. She at once started speaking in Megrelian. The driver jokingly rebuked her. She should learn to speak Russian properly, and not speak ‘Georgian’. Such light rebukes continued as the journey progressed, but as we got closer to Gali, more and more people switched to Megrelian. And by the time we reached Gali, everyone was speaking Megrelian, including the driver, who was called Badri, a typical Georgian name.

A Black Sea voyage

I took a ferry from Ilichevsk, just along the coast from Odessa, to Batumi, in Georgia. It was an experience, on more than one level. First of all were the trials of embarkation. When purchasing the ticket at the ferry company office in Odessa, the friendly clerk explained with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment the convoluted procedures for embarking a ferry in Ukraine. I think he must have been confronted with open-mouthed amazement from other western passengers before me. But this, he told me, was how it was done in Ukraine.

Firstly, while he could tell me the day of departure (or rather embarkation), he could not tell me the time. There was one ferry for Batumi per week. The captain would tell him the time of embarkation the day before, and he would pass on the information by SMS. The message duly came, and informed me that I should be at the embarkation office in Ilichevsk to register at 16.30. I turned up a little bit early, to be on the safe side. Three other western travellers, from England, France and Scotland, had the same idea. Usefully, the Scot had gone through all of this twice before, and was able to show us where to go and what to do.

So we went to the registration office, where we received a stamp on our tickets. Then it was a short walk down to the harbour, taking the short-cut, down a dirt track recommended by our Scottish fellow traveller. But there was no need to hurry. There followed a wait of several hours in a dismal little room, crowded with luggage, with no drinks machines or food, and not enough seats for everybody. Goodness it was tedious. The boredom of the six-hour wait was relieved only by the requirement to go to register once again with another lady at a little hatch in the wall in the corridor, who ticked our names off on a list. There was no announcement that we had to do that, and we only knew to do so because of our experienced Scottish friend.

At one point I needed to go the lavatory. This was hardly surprising given the length of the wait. I tried (with my extremely limited Russian) asking a lady in uniform who also seemed to be checking people off on a list (apparently she was not interested in checking me off), where the lavatory was. She pointed upstairs. So up I went, to what seemed to be an office. As I reached the top, I saw someone come out of the lavatory and lock the door behind her. I signalled to her that I wished to use it too. She seemed affronted, and angrily pointed me back down the stairs. This lavatory was not for passengers. I tried to explain that someone downstairs had told me to come upstairs, but she was having none of it. So back down I went, and tried (again with my very few words of Russian) to explain to the lady in the uniform that I had been told to come back down. At this point she lost patience. I could not understand what she said, but clearly I was nor to bother her further. So off I went to find a bush.

Through all of this, our Scottish friend remained untroubled. In fact, he seemed to being enjoying it. He sat there, with a smile on his face, assuring us that all would be well once we were on the boat. At some point, “that door there” would be opened, and we would be called through. In fact the door did open quite early on, for a man who spoke to us in Russian. His words did not seem to elicit any great excitement among the majority of would-be passengers who could speak Russian, so I did not worry. When we finally boarded the boat, and this same man gave me the key to my cabin, I asked him where we could get supper (we had been told at the office in Odessa that we would be given a meal the first evening). It’s 10.30, he replied, supper finished was hours ago. He had announced that there would be no supper on the boat, and that passengers should eat before boarding. Yes, but you announced it in Russian, I replied, and I don’t understand Russian. “What”, he was incredulous, “not at all?” So to bed without supper.

First thing in the morning, after a peaceful sleep, the ferry was still in Ilichevsk. Why had they made us check in at 16.30 the previous afternoon, when we would not board until 22.30, and not leave until 7.30 the following morning? Not just Ukrainian procedures, I suspect, but rather the lady at the office in Ilichevsk who stamped our tickets, and wanted to leave work by 5 pm.

But finally we were on our way. The ferry was actually first of all a freighter, carrying containers, lorries and, on a lower deck, railway carriages that were trundled on and off, directly on to railway tracks in Ilichevsk and Batumi. Many of the passengers were Georgian truck drivers, who spent the voyage either watching DVDs in the lounges, playing chess or drinking heroic quantities of vodka in the bar. A young Czech who was assigned to the same table as me for meal times spent an afternoon with some of these Georgians getting hopelessly drunk (they, of course, were hardly affected). It loosened his tongue remarkably that evening, as he told us, his voice slurring all over the place, how he was looking for God and could not stand Russians.

Spending three days on a boat, isolated from the world, without phones or internet access, is an unusual experience in this day and age. For a short while you become quite close to a small group of fellow passengers with whom you eat, drink and chat. During our voyage, the sea was calm, the sun hot, and we gently steamed along, each day following a natural rhythm from mealtime to mealtime. We could not understand why the boat sometimes chugged along very slowly indeed, while at other times it set quite a pace.

The Scot, who had made this voyage in both directions twice before, and clearly enjoyed it, was quite a character. In his seventies, I would guess, he made long journeys each year, with a backpack and a sketch pad, sleeping mainly in a tent, just occasionally spending a couple of nights in a cheap hotel to clean up. His trips included long walks of several days duration, pitching his tent by the side of the road, and eating what he could find as he went along. At the start of our voyage he was quite miffed, as his tent had been taken in Odessa, together with his best trousers. He had pitched it in a city park for five nights, and he suspected that the police had taken it. Perhaps not surprising, as pitching a tent in a public park was surely illegal. But he was annoyed that they had not given it back. He entertained hopes that somehow it would materialise, that even at that late stage the police would relent and let him have his tent back. No such luck. He was, however, not unhappy about having to spend a few nights in a hotel in Odessa, as he had needed a wash. He had stayed in a very cheap hotel. Having spent one night in a cheap hotel in Yalta (though not as cheap as his), I knew what cheap Ukrainian hotels could be like. His sounded horrible, complete with bed bugs. Why did he stay there, I asked? Would he at least not have wanted to be somewhere clean? Well, it was cleaner than my tent, he replied. There was no answer to that.

A remarkable man, with enormous energy and youthfulness for his years, gently taking everything in his stride, open to whatever adventures, hardships and pleasures came along. Good natured to a fault, he was also a committed member of one of those hard-line Scottish protestant churches, and held strong, if not always coherent, views on gays, Catholics, Jews and the leading Scottish Aristocracy. He considered that the Papist Scottish dukes really controlled Scotland, were responsible for the deaths of leading Scottish politicians, and were conspiring against him personally.

And then suddenly the voyage was over. Mobile phones were connected again some time before we reached the Georgian coast. And then we all went our separate ways.

Palaces and Princes at Yalta

Along the coast from Sevastopol, Yalta is also marked by history. What student of modern history would not be stirred by a visit to the nearby Livadia Palace, where the February 1945 Yalta Conference took place, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on the post-war fate of Europe? To see where the meetings took place, where the document was signed, where the famous photograph of the three leaders was taken?

Where the Yalta Conference Agreement was signed

The Livadia Palace had earlier been a summer residence of Tsar Nicholas II. Upstairs, wandering through rooms where they once stayed, now lined with photos of the imperial family, is also to feel the ghosts of history, from a different era. And the little chapel where the last Tsar and his family prayed, and where the Tsarina was received into the Orthodox Church before their accession to the throne.

A few miles further along the coast is the Vorontsovsky Palace, built as a summer residence for Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, a governor-general of New Russia. Vorontsov was raised and educated in Britain, where his father was Russian ambassador. He employed a British architect to design the palace, which mixes the typical style of an English country house with pronounced Moorish influences. It is a striking combination.

Vorontsovsky Palace

The palace sits above the Black Sea, with the Crimean mountains behind, and fits wonderfully into its setting. Churchill and the British delegation stayed at the Vorontsovsky palace during the Yalta conference. He was apparently not impressed, describing Yalta as the ‘Riviera of Hades’. He also joked that one of the lions in the gardens overlooking the sea looked like him.

One of the lions at the Vorontsovsky Palace

Vorontsov had a notable career, serving with distinction in the Napoleonic wars, and later leading Russia’s campaigns to subdue the north Caucasus. But he is perhaps best known for being cuckolded by Pushkin while the latter was exiled to Odessa. Visiting Vorontsov’s former residence in Odessa, looking at the remains of the terrace that overlooks the bay, one can imagine the great poet dancing with and seducing the princess at one of the balls that were no-doubt thrown.

Yalta was once a fashionable resort for the Russian aristocracy. Signs of its previous, now faded elegance remain as one strolls through some of the streets behind the seafront. In Soviet times, the town and its surroundings were designated by Lenin as a resort for the rest and recuperation of the workers. Numerous sanatoria were built up and down the coast around the town. What is left now is a rather gaudy, tacky seaside resort, frequented mainly by tourists from the former Soviet Union. This combination of faded elegance and mass tourist tat is in some ways reminiscent of Brighton.

Sevastopol and Russia

Few places are as brim-full with military history as Sevastopol. Built as a naval base when Russia first took over Crimea in the late 18th Century, it has been an important strategic point ever since. In the Crimean War, fought in the 1850s between Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia on one side, and Russia on the other, Sevastopol was besieged for almost a year, before it finally fell. The Russian defenders scuttled their ships across the mouth of the bay to block the entry of the British navy. In 1920, Sevastopol was one of the last hold-outs of the retreating White armies. And in World War II the city was again subjected to a long siege, before falling to the Germans in July 1942. It was recaptured by the Soviets in 1944, an almost completely ruined city. Sevastopol was declared one of the Soviet Union’s ‘Hero Cities’, which is commemorated by a huge monument in the pugnacious Socialist Realism style.

World War II memorial, Sevastopol

Almost everywhere you go in central Sevastopol are monuments to this military past. To a British visitor, this was an unfamiliar experience of visiting a city whose monuments portray a heroic defence against a British onslaught. To most in Britain, the Crimean War is mainly associated with the futile Charge of the Light Brigade commemorated in Tennyson’s poem. It is a military venture whose purpose seems hard to comprehend from a modern perspective. Yet at the time, Russia was seen as Britain’s main rival, and a threat to Britain’s empire in India. Propping up the ailing Ottomans against persistent Russian encroachments was regarded as a key interest. For the native Tartar population of Crimea, the participation of Ottoman troops must have excited hopes of liberation from Russian rule.

As well as statues commemorating the defenders of Sevastopol, the Panorama of Sevastopol’s Defence, a large circular building whose interior wall is covered with a vast painting depicting the climax of the siege is a centrepiece of the city’s war memorials. The Black Sea Fleet Museum portrays the war primarily, though not exclusively, from a Russian perspective. It was interesting to find that Russia had its equivalents of Florence Nightingale.

Panorama of Sevastopol's defence

The strategic importance of Sevastopol has continued to cause controversy more recently. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the position of Crimea, and especially of Sevastopol, in newly independent Ukraine was disputed by Russia and by the predominantly Russian local population. Crimea had been a full republic of the Soviet Union until Krushchev, himself Ukrainian, handed it to Ukraine in the 1950s. Sevastopol was of particular importance as the base of the Soviet, now Russian Black Sea Fleet. In 1997, a treaty was signed between Russia and Ukraine. Crimea was recognised as part of Ukraine (although as an autonomous republic), while Ukraine agreed to lease the naval base to Russia for 20 years. In 2010, the new, more pro-Russian government in Ukraine agreed to extend the lease for a further 25 years. This agreement provoked intense opposition in some quarters, including a brawl in Ukraine’s parliament.

So why is Sevastopol so important to Russia? In an age when airpower and missiles can strike anywhere, its attractiveness as a natural harbour looks less valuable. Looking at the ageing ships in the bay, the Black Sea Fleet does not appear especially impressive. In Soviet times, with NATO member Turkey just across the water, one could imagine why it was important. Probably it is partly a matter of national pride. For a city so steeped in Russian history, it is simply difficult to face up to the fact that it is no longer Russia. The proliferation of Russian flags in the city, including on many public buildings, make clear where the hearts of many of its residents lie. Is part of the motivation for Moscow now also to maintain a toehold in Ukraine, to retain leverage, and to undermine its independence? There has been a similar pattern in some other Soviet successor states in Russia’s ‘near abroad’, with separatist territories supported by Moscow in Georgia and Moldova.

Vanished peoples of Crimea

To a modern world steeped in the political culture of the nation state, schooled to believe in the unique value of the nations to which we belong, with their long and illustrious histories, great literary traditions, and irreplaceably distinct customs and cultures, visiting Crimea can be disconcerting. With its ghostly, abandoned cities and settlements, once the homes of thriving civilisations that are now no more, Crimea is testament to all that is transient, insecure and ephemeral in the world. Civilisations grow, flourish, and then pass into history, leaving only haunted remnants of what is gone forever.

In many countries we are used to thinking of our nation’s history as a progression, through different eras, changing, and yet continuous, with layers of heritage building on each other, all contributing to the formation of a modern nation, a gradual accretion of experience and accomplishment, gain and loss, continuing on into the future. Just as the English perceive a thread linking them with Alfred the Great, so nations on every continent find unique value in their heritage. But Crimea bears witness to the vanity of such notions.

Gifted by Krushchev to Ukraine in the 1950s, Crimea had been taken over by imperial Russia only in the 1780s, its colonisation taking place on the back of the displacement of the Tartars. The history of Crimea is not one of continuity, but rather of repeated invasion and migration, each new arrival displacing or assimilating those who were already there.

The landscape around Bakhchisaray and southern Crimea is one of high-cliffed plateaus, with deep ravines in between. Bakhchisaray itself sits in one such ravine, cliffs rising dramatically on both sides. Nearby is the stronghold of Chufut Kale, strung out along one such plateau. Now abandoned, Chufut Kale means ‘Jewish Fortress’ in the Crimean Tartar language. The site had once been inhabited by the Sarmatian Alans, but was taken over by the Tartars when they invaded Crimea. In the 15th Century, it was established as the Khan’s capital, before it was moved to nearby Bakhchisaray. From the 17th Century, the only remaining inhabitants were adherents of the Karaite Jewish sect, hence the name, Chufut Kale.

The main street in Chufut Kale

The religious origins of the Karaites are disputed, as well as the ethnic origins of the Crimean Karaim. Contrary to Rabbinic Judaism, they accept only scripture as having ultimate authority, and not the interpretations of the Talmud. The sect thrived in Mesopotamia a thousand years ago, but the origins of the Turkic-speaking Karaim of Crimea are uncertain. It has often been claimed that they are descendants of Khazars, converts to Judaism who once ruled an empire in swathes of territory in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine.

Following Crimea’s incorporation into the Russian Empire, the Karaim abandoned Chufut Kale, settling in towns on the Crimean coast and elsewhere in Russia. The Karaim managed to avoid some of Russia’s oppressive anti-Semitic laws, citing spurious proofs that the community had been living in Crimea since before the time of Christ, and that therefore they could not share in the perceived collective, inherited Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. The assertion that they were Turkic converts was also cited in their favour. In a further, even more bizarre twist, during the World War Two German occupation, Nazi bureaucrats in Berlin were persuaded that the Karaim were not Jewish at all, although of inferior racial stock, and that they should therefore be spared the holocaust.

Today, the Karaim are gone from Chufut Kale. The remaining adherents of the sect are found mainly in Israel and the United States, with just a small number remaining in Crimea. Chufut Kale itself is a ghost town, its streets frequented by tourists and a few artists. Some buildings remain intact, including a prayer house and the former home of Avraam Firkovich, now a museum displaying old photos of the once thriving community. It was Firkovich who had provided the falsified ‘evidence’ of the Karaim’s history in Crimea that won favour with the Tsars.

As in many of these high settlements in Crimea, Chufut Kale was partly built below the ground, in caves carved and enlarged out of the rock. Now bare, their windows and doors open to the elements, exploring these caves, with their ledges and niches, it is hard to imagine the people that once lived here, the lives they led. This was a living, settled community for hundreds of years, with traditions, a language, customs, and now it is all over, the people gone.

Cave room, Chufut Kale

Spookiest of all is a stroll through the vast cemetery in the Iosofatova Valley, below Chufut Kale. Here, for centuries, the Karaim buried their dead. The graves are still there, thousands of them, higgledy-piggledy among the trees, many of the tombstones, covered in Hebrew script, overturned or upended by tree roots or subsidence. I walked through this forest cemetery, alone in the silence, in the early evening, with the sun low in the sky sending its beams almost horizontally through the trees. But the feeling of spookiness was not because of the long-dead people at rest there. Rather, it was that walking among these thousands of graves brings home that this is not just a cemetery of the people buried there, but of the civilisation, the world to which they belonged, which is now extinct. There are no Karaim left at Chufut Kale to tend or visit the graves. The tombs are just there, a silent memory of a lost world, slowly being reclaimed by the forest. Among the ancient tombs are a handful of graves from recent years, their inscriptions in Cyrillic, Karaim from elsewhere, for whom Chufut Kale is their home soil, in which, together with their ancestors, they would like to rise on judgement day.

Karaite cemetery, Chufut Kale

A few miles south of Bakhchisaray, is the site of another abandoned cliff-top stronghold, Mangup Kale. At one time, Mangup Kale was the capital of the Crimean principality of Gothia. Migrating from north-west Europe, the Germanic Goths conquered much of the northern Black Sea coast, including Crimea, in the 3rd Century AD, before being pushed out by the Huns a hundred years later. But some of the Goths hung on in Crimea, were Christianised and incorporated into the Byzantine Empire. Following a failed attempt to resist the Khazar conquest of Crimea in the 8th Century, the Goths retreated to their plateau at Mangup, and there they remained, worshiping at their basilicas, living their isolated lives until the 15th Century, when, a few years after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Turks besieged and conquered Mangup as well.

The citadel, Mangup Kale

Little is known about the Crimean Gothic realm. Linked by religion and its long association with Byzantium with the Greek world, at the end Gothia was allied with the Empire of Trebizond (modern-day Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey). Probably Mangup had been a true Crimean ethnic mix, Gothic, Greek, Sarmatian, Jewish. Certainly there were Karaim there. Walking up through the forest to the Mangup plateau, one passes through another Karaite cemetery, hundreds more tombs eerily bearing witness to the people that were once there. At the top, there is not much left. The monumental gateway to the citadel is still standing. The basilica of Saint Constantine is no more than a couple of overgrown walls. At the tip of the plateau, beyond the citadel, overlooking terrifying precipices, are more elaborate cave rooms, hewn out of the rock, with stairways, alcoves, windows and doors.

The Mangup plateau is a beautiful place to stroll on a hot summer’s day, broad meadows with a profusion of wild flowers, with walls, towers, the foundations of buildings scattered about here and there, the remains of the city that once stood. Walking there is a humbling experience. Here was a city, with fine buildings and monuments, a distinct people with their own language and traditions. And it is all gone, bar a few almost forgotten ruins, returned to dust.

Remains of the basilica of St Constantine
Mangup Kale

What a romantic idea! That once upon a time, in the mountains of southern Crimea, far away from the Germanic peoples of western Europe, a Gothic realm endured from ancient times almost to the modern era. It is an idea that excited travellers and scholars. Adolf Hitler too was interested, and plans were discussed by the Nazis to resettle Germans from South Tyrol, the northern Italian region of Alto Adige, in a renewed Gothia, in Crimea, its cities renamed to reflect the Gothic heritage. But it was a fantasy. The Crimean Goths are long gone. But where did they go to? Most likely they simply converted to Islam and were assimilated into the Crimean Tartar people. As my hostess in Bakhchisaray told me, in different regions of Crimea the Tartars have different physiognomies, reflecting their various ethnic antecedents. Some of them are probably more than a little Gothic.

Return to Crimea

There are few places in the world where the migrations of peoples, the ebb and flow of empires, have left so many and such diverse traces in such a small area as Crimea. Scythians, Sarmatians, Greeks, Goths, Huns, Jews, Italians, Mongols, Turks, Russians, all have passed through. Some have been swept out or assimilated by the next wave of invaders; others have hung on for thousands of years. Their remains have been left, layer upon layer, the remnants, in some cases, of civilisations that have passed away.

The Crimean Tartars have been more tenacious than most. The Crimean Khanate, with its capital in Bakhchisaray, a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, was annexed by imperial Russia in the 1780s. Their homeland steadily swamped by Russians, politically marginalised, over subsequent decades the Tartars left in droves for Turkey, many of them perishing on the journey.

The Khan's palace, Bakhchisaray

Persecuted by the Soviet regime, their elite killed or imprisoned, those that remained suffered their greatest tragedy in May 1944. As a collective punishment for the collaboration of some of their community with the Germans (hardly surprising considering their sufferings at the hands of the Soviet regime), the Crimean Tartar population was deported en masse to central Asia. As my guest house hostess in Bakhchisaray explained, they were given only 15 minutes to pack their things, before being herded into trains. Many did not survive the journey, and others died not long after their arrival. This despite the fact that thousands of Crimean Tartar men served in the Soviet army. They returned to Crimea at the end of the war to find their families gone, and were themselves packed off into exile.

Yet my hostess spoke proudly of the resilience of her people. Many of those who survived prospered in central Asia. She and her husband were teachers in Uzbekistan, and built themselves a big house. According to her, the Crimean Tartars were harder working and better educated than the Uzbeks. But, she said, they always knew they would return one day to Crimea. It was a rich and beautiful land, and it was theirs, even though she herself was born in Uzbekistan.

Their chance came as the communists began to lose their grip. She and her family came back in 1991, just before the end of the Soviet Union. It was easier then, as it was still one country. As they were already settled in Crimea when independence came, they automatically received Ukrainian citizenship. And because they bought a house before the new, Ukrainian currency was introduced, they did not, like some later returnees, see the Roubles they received for their home in Uzbekistan lose their value. They were luckier than many, who having sold their homes in central Asia, were left without money to buy a new place in Crimea. Even so, initially the best they could afford was a tumble-down old house, much poorer than the one they had had in Uzbekistan.

As my hostess told me, no Crimean Tartar had tried to reclaim the homes their families had owned, now occupied by Russians, even though in some cases the keys they had taken with them into exile still fitted the locks. Many Russians had not welcomed the Tartars’ return, and, said my hostess, there had been peer pressure not to sell houses to Tartars. Those returnees who had not been able to buy houses, as her family had, had taken over unoccupied land and built shacks there. According to the law, after a certain period of occupation, they could claim the land as their own, and build proper houses. All this, my hostess averred, was evidence of the determination and resilience of the Crimean Tartars. And just as she was proud of their success as exiles, in Uzbekistan, so she contrasted the spirit of the Tartars with the Russian settlers who had taken their homes. You can imagine, she said, what kind of people would take over the houses of others. They were lazy, she said. They had not even maintained the Tartar houses they had occupied.

And indeed, walking through Bakhchisaray there is plenty of evidence of Tartar success since their return to Crimea, with thriving restaurants and guest houses catering for tourists. My hostess told me that, on her return, she had only been able to get a teaching job in a village several kilometres away from Bakhchisaray. But she had got up early every morning and walked there. She and her husband had saved and eventually knocked down the rickety house they had bought, and built a bigger, better one, with space for paying guests. Now her son was studying to be a lawyer, because, as she said, it is important to know your rights and how to fight for them. The Crimean Tartars, she told me, had twice been left with almost nothing, when they were sent to central Asia, and when they returned to Crimea. And both times they picked themselves up and thrived. Hers was a story of tragedy, but also of pride and of hope.

The Crimean Tartars are back, and though a minority in their land, they are a force that cannot be ignored. But who are they? My hostess told me that it is in fact incorrect to refer to them as ‘Tartars’, a name given to them by the Russians. Indeed, the name ‘Tartar’ is a misnomer. The Tartars were one of the tribes conquered by Genghis Khan as he united the people who became the Mongols. According to my hostess, the Crimean Tartars were an ethnic mixture of the varied peoples who had lived in Crimea, including Mongols, Goths, Greeks, Italians and others who had been united by their conversion to Islam. They were the native people of Crimea, and should be known simply as Crimeans.

Not all Crimeans speak their own, Tartar tongue, a Turkic language, closely related to Turkish. In their exile, many switched to Russian. Indeed, although my hostess told me she and her family spoke Tartar, I noticed that, among themselves the family spoke Russian. When introducing me to her (non-English speaking) husband, I noted a look of surprise on his face that she spoke to him in Tartar, and they quickly switched to Russian. She told me there were now 14 Tartar schools in Crimea, including one in Bakhchisaray, but most of the tuition was in Russian. Before the exile, she told me, many of the Russians in Bakhchisaray, the minority at that time, could speak Tartar. On their return, they found some elderly Russians who had been there since before their departure, who could speak the Tartar language better than many Tartars themselves.

Khan's Palace gardens, Bakhchisaray

The former palace of the Crimean khans has been renovated and turned into a museum. And even if one cannot help suspecting that some features, such as the stained glass and the rose gardens, might be more in the taste of 21st Century Russians than of the 18th Century Khans, it gives some impression of the Islamic civilisation that preceded the Russian takeover, a provincial outpost of the Ottoman Empire. Especially famous is the Fountain of Tears, commissioned for the last Khan, to mark his grief for the unrequited love for a Polish woman, enslaved in his harem, who had pined away, unable to accept her new life. Moved by the story, Pushkin wrote a poem about it. He also started the tradition of leaving a red rose for love, and a yellow one for chagrin, at the fountain. The story may have its charm, but it reveals a dark side of Crimea’s past. Under the Khans the slave trade was one of the most important pillars of the economy, with raids into Ukraine, Poland and Russia to provide perhaps millions of slaves for the Ottoman Empire.

Strolls through Odessa

I had long been attracted by an idea of Odessa. I imagined a romantic city, a city of writers (Isaac Babel, Pushkin, Gogol were all there), of revolution (the uprising commemorated in Eisenstein’s classic 1925 film “The Battleship Potemkin”), a cosmopolitan melting pot, like a number of other great multi-ethnic ports of the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. Of course, some of the romance of Odessa was either fantasy or had slipped irrevocably into the past. But the city retains plenty of allure. Its name, it is said, was to be Odessus, after a former ancient Greek port along the coast. But Catherine the Great decided that the city should be feminine, and named it Odessa.

Odessa views

Like Salonika, Trieste and Istanbul, its multi-ethnic character suffered under the blows of the modern nation state and the conflicts of the 20th Century. Most of the city’s Jews, perhaps a third of its population at one point, those who survived Nazi occupation, left for Israel or New York. Eisenstein’s famous scene of the massacre on the Potemkin Steps was a fabrication (killings had taken place elsewhere in the city during the 1905 revolution). Indeed, the Potemkin Steps, the city’s most famous feature, are an anti-climax today. Looking down them, from the top, they lead nowhere. Just a main road and a wall, with a high-rise hotel behind it. What a shame. Once the steps swept down to the sea, linking the port with the city above. It does not help that the stages between the flights of steps are tarmacked over, or that they are flanked on the sides by corrugated iron and wasteland. Looking up from the bottom, however, the drama of the steps is more evident, the tarmac invisible, and the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, governor of New Russia early in the 19th Century (and later a prime minister of post-revolutionary France), majestic in classical pose at the top.

The appointment of a Frenchman as governor, a general in the service of the Tsar during the French revolutionary wars, was an indication of the cosmopolitan nature of the city, whose inhabitants came from around Europe to build the new city, a free city that flourished in the first half of the 19th century, its wealth built on trade. And maybe something of that spirit has survived. There is still a Jewish population. Wandering through the tree-lined streets of the 19th Century city centre, I came across the synagogue, across the road Orthodox Jews sitting and chatting at an outdoor café, while their children, the boys sporting kippas, ran about on the pavement.

Odessa still has a vibrant atmosphere, and an active cultural life. The bottom of the Potemkin steps and a few modern eyesores notwithstanding, it is a stylish city, both its buildings, in their faded, and in some cases restored elegance, and its inhabitants. One of its most elegant inhabitants told me Odessa was a “slut”, in that its people follow whichever rulers come along. Now, she told me, it is potentates from Donetsk who call the shots, and impose their tastes on Odessa. Yet Odessa’s charms have survived revolution, Stalinism and Romanian occupation during the Second World War. They survived the drabness of the Brezhnev era, and hopefully they will survive the vulgar tastes of Donetsk tycoons as well.

Odessa is a joy to stroll through. Street after street of elegant buildings, many of them with beautiful courtyards, some with statues or old wells. Will these lovely old buildings, with their great iron gates, survive the impetus to modernise? Odessa is a green city, almost all its streets lined with great old trees. Loveliest of all was walking down the central Deribasovskaya Street on a cool evening, with the pungent scent of the linden trees in bloom.

Catherine the Great, Odessa

There are many statues in Odessa, of the people who made the city or who lived there: its founder, de Ribas, the Spanish-Irish soldier who founded the city, as well as Pushkin and Richelieu. Statues have also been a cause of controversy. Not far from the top of the Potemkin Steps is a statue of Catherine the Great, in whose reign Odessa was founded. Her statue had been erected in 1900, but was dismantled by the communists, and later replaced by a monument commemorating the 1905 mutiny. The decision to put Catherine back in her place, in 2007, sparked the ire of Ukrainian Cossacks and many other Ukrainians, who revile Catherine as the ruler who subdued the Zaporizhia Cossacks in eastern Ukraine, and incorporated Ukraine into imperial Russia. More recently, there was an unsuccessful move to raise a statue of Stalin in the city.

Odessa is an under-appreciated jewel of the Black Sea. Still stylish, with little of the tourism tat that has afflicted Yalta and many other places. It is a beautiful city, with a relaxed pace of life reminiscent of the Mediterranean, and a cultivated city, proud of the legacy of the writers who lived there, and with a rich cultural life still.

Images of Kiev

Kiev is a city of hills. One of those, along the bank of the Dnieper, has for centuries been a favoured site for some of the city’s most important monuments. Three of these, spread out along the top of the hill, present very different images of Ukraine from different phases in its history.

At one end of the hill is the colossal ‘Rodina Mat’, the ‘Motherland’ monument, a 62-metre high statue of a female warrior, which sits atop the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. It is an imposing sight, a memorial to the victory that for several decades was perhaps the most important legitimising achievement of the Soviet Union.

Rodni Mat memorial, Kiev

In front of the statue is a park of socialist realism sculptures of Soviet soldiers and workers in heroic poses, biceps bulging, fists punching, weapons held aloft, defiant, all-sacrificing, unconquerable. There is also a series of stone blocks depicting the names of the cities awarded the title of ‘Hero City’ for their courage during the war of 1941-1945. Behind them are photographs of elderly people in uniform, their breasts covered with medals, some of them looking grimly dignified, others with chirpy smiles.

All these images, the statue, the sculptures, the hero cities and the heroic defenders of the motherland appear to have an almost religious significance. Indeed, this is a shrine, as important for the Soviet Union as any Christian shrine, and much of the imagery is reminiscent of and borrowed from Christian images. Rodina Mat reminds at the same time of the figure of Jesus on the cross, arms outstretched, and also of Christ transfigured, shining in glory. Such statues peppered the Soviet Union. They were the cathedrals of communism, marking its victory over its foes. The heroic sculptures are like statues in churches, idealised depictions of workers and soldiers, much like saints and angels in a different setting. The photos of the veterans are like icons of the saints, encouraging people by their example to strive to be model Soviet citizens.

The museum itself walks the visitor through the Soviet Union’s struggle against the German invaders. It is a striking, informative and at times moving display, depicting as well as the titanic struggle between the two countries, the terrible, immeasurable sufferings of the people of Ukraine and the Soviet Union at the hands of the occupiers. But the monument itself stands as a museum to a bygone realm. Like a medieval Christian cathedral standing in a secularised country, a lasting symbol of a religion, in this case communism, that has lost its appeal and its relevance in a world that has moved on.

Next door to Rodina Mat is the Lavra monastery complex. Originating in the 11th Century, it was largely rebuilt in the 18th, in Baroque style, although some medieval elements remain. It did not escape the devastation inflicted on religious buildings around Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union during the communist period. At the centre of the monastery, the Dormition Cathedral was blown up during the Second World War, probably by Soviet Partisans. Following the end of communist rule, a replica of the cathedral was rebuilt.

Such vandalism occurred in many places. The 12th Century St. Michael’s monastery in central Kiev was demolished by the Soviets in the 1930s, and rebuilt after the end of the Soviet Union. Thankfully the nearby 11th Century St. Sophia’s Cathedral was left intact.

One of the holiest sites for Orthodox Christians, the revival of Lavra is a turning back to an older spirituality, and away from the discredited prophets of communism represented at the Rodina Mat statue. As at St. Michael’s and elsewhere, the numerous young monks in their long black cassocks (surely horribly uncomfortable in the summer heat) bear witness to the resurgence of Orthodox belief. The Church has recovered its position of respect. Walking through the grounds, monks are repeatedly waylaid by pilgrims asking to receive their blessing and to kiss their hands.

Of particular interest to pilgrims and tourists alike at Lavra is the maze of catacombs, where the original monks lived, prayed and were laid to rest when they died. Their bodies, preserved and mummified in the cool, dry atmosphere, are still there, inside glass cases, in some cases their shrivelled black hands poking out of vestments that cover most of their bodies. For the pilgrims these are saints. They murmur prayers, cross themselves and kiss the glass cases, as they wander through the low, dim passages, lighting their way with candles. For them, it is clearly an intensely moving, even ecstatic experience. For the foreign outsider, it is a little uncomfortable, like a snoop gawping at the private rapture of others which they cannot share and do not understand.

Holodomor and Lavra monastery

A little further on from Lavra is the ‘Holodomor’ memorial, marking the artificially induced famine which killed millions in Ukraine, as well as southern Russia, in the early 1930s, as a result of the disastrous policy of collectivisation. In front of the monument is a small statue of a frail little girl, dressed in a simple dress, distressingly thin, with an empty, hungry expression. It is an affecting representation of the tragedy of the famine. And it is in sharp contrast to the bombastic sculptures with their heroic figures at the Rodina Mat statue. The little girl seems to stand as a quiet admonition to all the false claims and promises of communism glorified at Rodina Mat.

Underneath the monument is an exhibition, including agricultural implements and household objects from the villages of that era. Screened around the interior walls of the monument, a film is shown, detailing the forced collectivisation and the famine that followed. With footage from the time and documents concerning the policy and its implementation, the film is a distressing and moving account of one of the great crimes of the 20th Century.

With its conclusion, that only since the achievement of Ukraine’s independence has it been possible to discuss the Holodomor openly, the film asserts that all Ukrainians need to realise that only in an independent state can they realise their national consciousness. In a country many of whose people remain attached to Russia and to the Russian heritage, and whose identity as a distinct nation is questioned by some, the Holodomor memorial thus also serves a nation-building purpose.

The film’s presentation of the famine as a deliberate attack on the Ukrainian nation, as part of a policy aimed at the subjugation of the country and its people, is disputed by some. As committed communists, Stalin and his regime saw collectivisation as a crucial element in building the future socialist paradise. They were never comfortable with Lenin’s New Economic Policy, the compromise of the 1920s which sought to restore agricultural production by allowing private farmers to continue to work their land as they knew how. For Stalin, socialism meant the end of private enterprise and the extermination of the class of better-off peasants, the ‘Kulaks’, who farmed the land most effectively.

Collectivisation and the end of private enterprise were a part of the communist creed. The policy was identified with Stalin personally. So when agricultural production fell, it could not have been because the policy was wrong. Rather, as Stalin saw it, it must have been because of sabotage by peasants resisting the building of the socialist future, hoarding food and deliberately failing to meet their quotas. And so they had to be taught a lesson. The grain had to be seized. Their resistance spirit had to be stifled. Protestations that the grain being seized was the last they had, leaving them not enough to plant for the following year, were met without sympathy.

Ukraine and southern Russia were the breadbaskets of the Soviet Union. So collectivisation was particularly significant there, and the consequences of its failure especially serious. When Ukrainian peasants did not deliver the quantities of grain expected of them, they were identified as enemies of the revolution, and as such had to be dealt with without mercy.

So where does the tragedy of the Holodomor leave the proud Soviet veterans, bedecked in medals, the saints of a discredited religion? Of course, most of them had no personal responsibility for the mass murder of the Holodomor. But how to be a hero of a wicked regime once its crimes have been exposed?

During a previous stay in Ukraine, I met a regional leader of the lingering Communist Party, mainly a party of nostalgic elderly people disorientated and left out after the end of the regime. He came across as a kindly, decent man, courteous and friendly. But how, I could not help asking myself, in the light of what we know about the famine and other monstrosities of the communist period, could he continue to fly the banner of a party with such a heritage, with such a responsibility? Should he not rather apologise in the name of his party for the horrors perpetrated in its name?

No doubt the positive personal experiences of some during the communist era, like the feted veterans, outweighed for them its dark side, which most of them must have been aware of, even if only at the dim margins of their consciousness. Although the heroic images at the Rodni Mat statue may be a myth, the sufferings of millions who endured Nazi occupation and fought to defeat it were real enough. But the image presented at Rodni Mat has been brought into disrepute. The older image of the onion domes, the icons and the saints of Lavra, has endured and been revived and holds far greater resonance among Ukrainians today. And the image of the Holodomor memorial, with the statue of the innocent little girl, stands as a far truer testament of the nature of the communist regime than the secular idols of Rodni Mat.